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  3. Cambridge Studies in Social Theory, Religion and Politics

In societies around the world, dynamic changes are occurring at the intersection of religion and politics. In some settings, these changes are driven by internal shifts within religions; in others, by shifting political structures, institutional contexts, or by war or other upheavals. Cambridge Studies in Social Theory, Religion and Politics publishes books that seek to understand and explain these changes to a wide audience, drawing on insight from social theory and original empirical analysis. We welcome work built on strong theoretical framing, careful research design, and rigorous methods using any social scientific method(s) appropriate to the study. The series examines the relationship of religion and politics broadly understood, including directly political behavior, action in civil society and in the mediating institutions that undergird politics, and the ways religion shapes the cultural dynamics underlying political and civil society.

  • General Editors: David E. Campbell, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Stanford University, California, Richard L. Wood, University of New Mexico
  • Founding Editors: David C. Leege, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Kenneth D. Wald, University of Florida

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34 results in Cambridge Studies in Social Theory, Religion and Politics

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Resurrecting Democracy
  • Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life
  • Luke Bretherton
  • Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    22 December 2014
  • Through a case study of community organizing in the global city of London and an examination of the legacy of Saul Alinsky around the world, this book develops a constructive account of the relationship between religious diversity, democratic citizenship, and economic and political accountability. Based on an in-depth, ethnographic study, Part I identifies and depicts a consociational, populist and post-secular vision of democratic citizenship by reflecting on the different strands of thought and practice that feed into and help constitute community organizing. Particular attention is given to how organizing mediates the relationship between Christianity, Islam and Judaism and those without a religious commitment in order to forge a common life. Part II then unpacks the implications of this vision for how we respond to the spheres in which citizenship is enacted, namely, civil society, the sovereign nation-state, and the globalized economy. Overall, the book outlines a way of re-imagining democracy, developing innovative public policy, and addressing poverty in the contemporary context.

Free Trade and Faithful Globalization
  • Saving the Market
  • Amy Reynolds
  • Published online:
    05 December 2014
    Print publication:
    24 November 2014
  • Through an analysis of Christian communities in the United States, Canada, and Costa Rica, this book analyzes how religious groups talk about the politics surrounding economic life. Amy Reynolds examines how these Christian organizations speak about trade and the economy as moral and value-laden spaces, deserving ethical reflection and requiring political action. She reveals the ways in which religious communities have asked people to engage in new approaches to thinking about the market and how they have worked to create alternative networks and policies governing economic and social life.

Seeking the Promised Land
  • David E. Campbell, John C. Green, J. Quin Monson
  • Published online:
    05 August 2014
    Print publication:
    31 July 2014
  • Mormons have long had an outsized presence in American culture and politics, but they remain largely unknown to most Americans. Recent years have seen the political prominence of Mormons taken to a new level - including the presidential candidacy of Republican Mitt Romney, the prominent involvement of Mormons in the campaign for California's Proposition 8 (anti-gay marriage), and the ascendancy of Democrat Harry Reid to the position of Senate Majority Leader. This book provides the most thorough examination ever written of Mormons' place in the American political landscape - what Mormons are like politically and how non-Mormons respond to Mormon candidates. However, this is a book about more than Mormons. As a religious subculture in a pluralistic society, Mormons are a case study of how a religious group balances distinctiveness and assimilation - a question faced by all faiths.

Religion and Authoritarianism
  • Cooperation, Conflict, and the Consequences
  • Karrie J. Koesel
  • Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    24 February 2014
  • This book provides a rare window into the micropolitics of contemporary authoritarian rule through a comparison of religious-state relations in Russia and China - two countries with long histories of religious repression, and even longer experiences with authoritarian politics. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in multiple sites in these countries, this book explores what religious and political authority want from one another, how they negotiate the terms of their relationship, and how cooperative or conflicting their interactions are. This comparison reveals that while tensions exist between the two sides, there is also ample room for mutually beneficial interaction. Religious communities and their authoritarian overseers are cooperating around the core issue of politics - namely, the struggle for money, power and prestige - and becoming unexpected allies in the process.

The Origins of Global Humanitarianism
  • Religion, Empires, and Advocacy
  • Peter Stamatov
  • Published online:
    05 December 2013
    Print publication:
    23 December 2013
  • Whether lauded and encouraged or criticized and maligned, action in solidarity with culturally and geographically distant strangers has been an integral part of European modernity. Traversing the complex political landscape of early modern European empires, this book locates the historical origins of modern global humanitarianism in the recurrent conflict over the ethical treatment of non-Europeans that pitted religious reformers against secular imperial networks. Since the sixteenth-century beginnings of European expansion overseas and in marked opposition to the exploitative logic of predatory imperialism, these reformers - members of Catholic orders and, later, Quakers and other reformist Protestants - developed an ideology and a political practice in defense of the rights and interests of distant 'others'. They also increasingly made the question of imperial injustice relevant to growing 'domestic' publics in Europe. A distinctive institutional model of long-distance advocacy crystallized out of these persistent struggles, becoming the standard weapon of transnational activists.

Sacred and Secular
  • Religion and Politics Worldwide
  • 2nd edition
  • Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    17 October 2011
  • This book develops a theory of existential security. It demonstrates that the publics of virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving toward more secular orientations during the past half century, but also that the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before. This second edition expands the theory and provides new and updated evidence from a broad perspective and in a wide range of countries. This confirms that religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially in poorer nations and in failed states. Conversely, a systematic erosion of religious practices, values and beliefs has occurred among the more prosperous strata in rich nations.

The Price of Freedom Denied
  • Religious Persecution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century
  • Brian J. Grim, Roger Finke
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    06 December 2010
  • The Price of Freedom Denied shows that, contrary to popular opinion, ensuring religious freedom for all reduces violent religious persecution and conflict. Others have suggested that restrictions on religion are necessary to maintain order or preserve a peaceful religious homogeneity. Brian J. Grim and Roger Finke show that restricting religious freedoms is associated with higher levels of violent persecution. Relying on a new source of coded data for nearly 200 countries and case studies of six countries, the book offers a global profile of religious freedom and religious persecution. Grim and Finke report that persecution is evident in all regions and is standard fare for many. They also find that religious freedoms are routinely denied and that government and the society at large serve to restrict these freedoms. They conclude that the price of freedom denied is high indeed.

Secularism and State Policies toward Religion
  • The United States, France, and Turkey
  • Ahmet T. Kuru
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    20 April 2009
  • Why do secular states pursue different policies toward religion? This book provides a generalizable argument about the impact of ideological struggles on the public policy making process, as well as a state-religion regimes index of 197 countries. More specifically, it analyzes why American state policies are largely tolerant of religion, whereas French and Turkish policies generally prohibit its public visibility, as seen in their bans on Muslim headscarves. In the United States, the dominant ideology is 'passive secularism', which requires the state to play a passive role, by allowing public visibility of religion. Dominant ideology in France and Turkey is 'assertive secularism', which demands that the state play an assertive role in excluding religion from the public sphere. Passive and assertive secularism became dominant in these cases through certain historical processes, particularly the presence or absence of an ancien régime based on the marriage between monarchy and hegemonic religion during state-building periods.

Religion, Class Coalitions, and Welfare States
  • Edited by Kees van Kersbergen, Philip Manow
  • Published online:
    28 January 2010
    Print publication:
    06 April 2009
  • This book radically revises established knowledge in comparative welfare state studies and introduces a new perspective on how religion shaped modern social protection systems. The interplay of societal cleavage structures and electoral rules produced the different political class coalitions sustaining the three welfare regimes of the Western world. In countries with proportional electoral systems the absence or presence of state–church conflicts decided whether class remained the dominant source of coalition building or whether a political logic not exclusively based on socio-economic interests (e.g. religion) was introduced into politics, particularly social policy. The political class-coalitions in countries with majoritarian systems, on the other hand, allowed only for the residual-liberal welfare state to emerge, as in the US or the UK. This book also reconsiders the role of Protestantism. Reformed Protestantism substantially delayed and restricted modern social policy. The Lutheran state churches positively contributed to the introduction of social protection programs.

The Political Influence of Churches
  • Paul A. Djupe, Christopher P. Gilbert
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    15 December 2008
  • Djupe and Gilbert investigate the political influence of church and how membership in organized religious bodies shapes the political life of members. Djupe and Gilbert's goal in this inquiry is to re-center scholarly attention on the voluntary association as an essential element of American civic and political life. They develop a theoretical framework that captures the multifaceted elements of church life that affect individual political attitudes and actions. Political information from clergy, small groups, and social networks flows plentifully in churches, but individuals process that information differently depending on their motivations related to their status in the church. Articulating a more fully specified model of how associations expose individuals to political information and norms will help us understand the political opinions and behavior of citizens and the contribution of that pattern to sustaining democracy.

A World Survey of Religion and the State
  • Jonathan Fox
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    19 May 2008
  • This book delves into the extent of government involvement in religion between 1990 and 2002 using both quantitative and qualitative methodology. The study is based on the Religion and State dataset, which includes 175 governments across the globe, all of which are addressed individually in this book. The forms of involvement examined in this study include whether the government has an official religion, whether some religions are given preferential treatment, religious discrimination against minority religion, government regulation of the majority religion, and religious legislation. The study shows that government involvement in religion is ubiquitous, that it increased significantly during this period, and that only a minority of states, including a minority of democracies, have separation of religion and state. These findings contradict the predictions of religion's reduced public significance found in modernization and secularization theory. The findings also demonstrate that state religious monopolies are linked to reduced religious participation.

The Political Origins of Religious Liberty
  • Anthony Gill
  • Published online:
    05 September 2012
    Print publication:
    29 October 2007
  • The issue of religious liberty has gained ever-increasing attention among policy makers and the public. Whereas politicians have long championed the idea of religious freedom and tolerance, the actual achievement of these goals has been an arduous battle for religious minorities. What motivates political leaders to create laws providing for greater religious liberty? In contrast to scholars who argue that religious liberty results from the spread of secularization and modern ideas, Anthony Gill argues that religious liberty results from interest-based calculations of secular rulers. Using insights from political economists, Gill develops a theory of the origins of religious liberty based upon the political and economic interests of governing officials. Political leaders are most likely to permit religious freedom when it enhances their own political survival, tax revenue, and the economic welfare of their country. He explores his theory using cases from British America, Latin America, Russia, and the Baltic states.

Muslims and the State in Britain, France, and Germany
  • Joel S. Fetzer, J. Christopher Soper
  • Published online:
    05 September 2012
    Print publication:
    18 October 2004
  • Over ten million Muslims live in Western Europe. Since the early 1990s, and especially after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, vexing policy questions have emerged about the religious rights of native-born and immigrant Muslims. Britain has struggled over whether to give state funding to private Islamic schools. France has been convulsed over Muslim teenagers wearing the hijab in public schools. Germany has debated whether to grant 'public-corporation' status to Muslims. And each state is searching for policies to ensure the successful incorporation of practicing Muslims into liberal democratic society. This 2004 book analyzes state accommodation of Muslims' religious practices in Britain, France, and Germany, first examining three major theories: resource mobilization, political-opportunity structure, and ideology. It then proposes an additional explanation, arguing that each nation's approach to Muslims follows from its historically based church-state institutions.

Sacred and Secular
  • Religion and Politics Worldwide
  • Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart
  • Published online:
    05 September 2012
    Print publication:
    20 September 2004
  • Seminal thinkers of the nineteenth century - Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud - all predicted that religion would gradually fade in importance and cease to be significant with the emergence of industrial society. The belief that religion was dying became the conventional wisdom in the social sciences during most of the twentieth century. During the last decade, however, the secularization thesis has experienced the most sustained challenge in its long history. The traditional secularization thesis needs updating. Religion has not disappeared and is unlikely to do so. Nevertheless, the concept of secularization captures an important part of what is going on. This book develops a theory of secularization and existential security. Sacred and Secular is essential reading for anyone interested in comparative religion, sociology, public opinion, political behavior, political development, social psychology, international relations, and cultural change.

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